Teapartiers Who Reject Obamacare Could Be Paying Much More Than They Need To For Healthcare

By Rob Kall

That's right. While most teapartiers are senior citizens already on socialized medicine-- Medicare-- not needing health insurance, trying to keep those without from getting it, the few under Medicare age may be, as my mother used to say, cutting off their noses to spite their face.
They are refusing to look at the programs available to them under Obamacare.

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That's right. While most teapartiers are senior citizens already on
socialized medicine-- Medicare-- not needing health insurance,
trying to keep those without from getting it, the few under
Medicare age may be, as my mother used to say, cutting off their
noses to spite their face.

They are refusing to look at the programs available to them
under Obamacare. That may be because teapartiers and right wingers
are listening to and believing the lies they are being told by Fox
News and people like senator Ted Cruz. The truth is very different,
as Joan McCarter, at Dailykos.com reports in her article,
How one smart reporter debunked the Hannity/Fox News lie
machine.

Sean Hannity has been following the Ted Cruz "Obamacare
is ruining all our lives" on his Fox show, reinforcing the baseless
belief in most Fox viewers that the law is somehow going to throw
them to the health insurance wolves. That's despite the fact that
the Fox demographic is pretty much all on Medicare. But Fox exists
to reinforce Republican lies, so that's what they've been doing.
Salon's Eric Stern happened to catch Hannity in the act, featuring
four couples who swore they had been hurt by Obamacare, and
decided to do a little fact
checking . Debunking Hannity turned out to be
"appallingly easy" for Stern when he conducted follow up interviews
Hannity's guests.

First up was Paul Cox of Leicester, North Carolina, and his wife
Michelle. They told Hannity that they have had to cut the hours of
their employees in their construction business because they
couldn't afford to insure them.

Obamacare has no effect on businesses with 49 employees or less.
But in our brief conversation on the phone, Paul revealed that he
has only four employees. Why the cutback on his workforce? "Well,"
he said, "I haven't been forced to do so, it's just that I've
chosen to do so. I have to deal with increased costs." What costs?
And how, I asked him, is any of it due to Obamacare? There was a
long pause, after which he said he'd call me back. He never
did.

Actually, Cox could be getting a tax credit under Obamacare to help
provide insurance to his four employees. I think he probably
doesn't care as much about his employees' well-being as he wanted
the Fox audience to believe. The only requirement for Cox under the
law is that he informs his employees of the existence of the new
health insurance exchange.

Then there's Allison Denijs who told Hannity that she pays over
$13,000 a year in premiums and just got a letter from Blue Cross
saying that her current policy wasn't in compliance with the law,
so it was being discontinued and replaced. She also has a daughter
with a pre-existing condition who hasn't been covered. She's angry
because Obama promised that we could keep our existing policies.
Stern asked if she'd actually checked out the exchange. She hadn't.
Stern found "that they would be able to get a plan for around
$7,600, which would include coverage for their uninsured daughter.
This would be about a 60 percent reduction from what they would
have to pay on the pre-Obamacare market."

Not a bad deal. Likewise, Stern found a pretty good deal on the
exchange for the final couple, Robbie and Tina Robison from
Franklin, Tennessee. They're mad because their kids are grown, but
they have to have a policy that covers things they don't want like
maternity care, pediatric care, prenatal care and so forth. Welcome
to health insurance, Robbie and Tina. They're also mad because
their insurance agent told them they would have to pay 50-75
percent more for a plan compliant with the law.

Had they shopped on the exchange yet, I asked? No, Tina said, nor
would they. They oppose Obamacare and want nothing to do with it.
Fair enough, but they should know that I found a plan for them for,
at most, $3,700 a year, a 63 percent less than their current
bill.

Robbie and Tina need a new insurance agent. The thing for these
people who are so mad that their current insurance policies are
being discontinued is that they're being replaced with insurance
plans that actually cover stuff. That's going to mean bigger
premiums for some people, but what Hannity and all right-wing
pundits and politicians leave out is that the majority of these
people won't have to pay the full bill for those premiums. What
Hannity-types are also not admitting is that this is a pretty tiny
group of Americans, those who buy their insurance in the individual
market and who were already insured. So is Obamacare hurting all
Americans? Of course not, just the teeny-tiny bunch of die-hard
conservatives who will refuse to be helped.

Frankly, McCarter's article stands alone as a story of lies by
the right wing news media. But it also exemplifies how real people
are becoming victims of those lies.

Submitters Bio:

Rob Kall has spent his adult life as an awakener and empowerer-- first in the field of biofeedback, inventing products, developing software and a music recording label, MuPsych, within the company he founded in 1978-- Futurehealth, and founding, organizing and running 3 conferences: Winter Brain, on Neurofeedback and consciousness, Optimal Functioning and Positive Psychology (a pioneer in the field of Positive Psychology, first presenting workshops on it in 1985) and Storycon Summit Meeting on the Art Science and Application of Story-- each the first of their kind. Then, when he found the process of raising people's consciousness and empowering them to take more control of their lives one person at a time was too slow, he founded Opednews.com-- which has been the top search result on Google for the terms liberal news and progressive opinion for several years. Rob began his Bottom-up Radio show, broadcast on WNJC 1360 AM to Metro Philly, also available on iTunes, covering the transition of our culture, business and world from predominantly Top-down (hierarchical, centralized, authoritarian, patriarchal, big) to bottom-up (egalitarian, local, interdependent, grassroots, archetypal feminine and small.) Recent long-term projects include a book, Bottom-up-- The Connection Revolution, debillionairizing the planet and the Psychopathy Defense and Optimization Project.